Before Albany had a name,
before the courthouse,
before the highway,
before anybody drew a county line
through the red earth,
the river was already moving.
Thronateeska.
The place where the flint was picked up.
People came down through the longleaf
and knelt beside the water.
They reached beneath the current
and brought stone into the light.
Stone for cutting.
Stone for hunting.
Stone for fire.
Maybe that is where the story begins.
Not with the man.
Not even with the river.
With something buried
waiting to be lifted.
The Flint does not hurry.
It bends.
It disappears behind cypress
and comes back around.
It floods fields.
It falls again.
It carries Georgia clay southward
without asking anybody
where Georgia ends.
Creeks find it.
Rain finds it.
Things lost upstream
sometimes find it too.
And somewhere near Albany,
the Kinchafoonee and Muckalee
come wandering toward the same country
as if water remembers
where it belongs.
I spent half a lifetime
trying to get somewhere.
Turns out,
the river had been teaching
something different.
Go around what will not move.
Carry what you must.
Leave the rest on the bank.
There are things
you cannot understand
until you come home.
I was a boy once
in that country.
Red dirt on my shoes.
Gnats around my face.
Heat rising off fields
like the earth itself was breathing.
A grain bin beside a chicken house.
A cinder block.
A storm rolling across Southwest Georgia
with no concern whatsoever
for what I believed about God.
Then light.
Enough light
to make darkness impossible
for a little while.
I did not know the word
Thronateeska.
I did not know
people had been lifting stone
from that ground
for thousands of years.
I only knew
something had reached down
and lifted me,
the way you lift a child
asleep in the back of a truck
and carry him inside
without waking him.
Fire.
Water.
Stone.
Clay.
Maybe the old country
has always preached
with whatever it had.
A thunderstorm.
A river.
A live oak.
A grandmother standing in a kitchen.
A grandfather’s hands.
My father getting older.
Then me.
Children leaving home.
The sound of somebody
you love
coming back through the door.
We kept waiting for the burning bush.
Meanwhile,
the whole Basin was on fire.
Thronateeska.
Say it slowly.
An old name
beneath a newer one.
That happens to people too.
We collect names.
Son.
Husband.
Father.
Coach.
To boys who are grown men now.
Writer.
Old man,
if God gives us enough mornings.
But underneath them
there is something older.
The name God called me
before my mother
ever said mine out loud.
Maybe growing older
is not becoming someone else.
Maybe it is digging through
everything that accumulated
until you find
what was there
in the beginning.
The river keeps going.
Past Albany.
Past Newton.
Past fields where people
were born,
worked,
prayed,
fought,
forgave,
and were buried.
South toward Florida.
South toward another river.
South toward the sea.
It takes the Basin with it
one grain at a time.
But tonight,
somewhere beneath that water,
there is still flint.
Waiting.
And somewhere on the bank
a boy is standing
beneath a Georgia sky
believing the whole world
has only just begun.
He does not know
how far he will wander.
He does not know
how much he will lose.
He does not know
how many times
he will have to find his way back.
Let him wander.
The river knows.
The river has always known.
One day
he will come back
and kneel beside the water.
He will reach beneath the current
and close his hand around something ancient,
and he will notice
it is his grandfather’s hand now.
Then he will understand
what the people before him knew.
Some things are not found.
They are remembered.
Lift the stone.
Carry the fire.
Follow the river home.
Boutwell Jones
Red Clay Gospe
l